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Google Wants to Index Millions of Old Newspapers

Remember the days before the Internet when you would go to the library to browse old microfilm of newspapers and magazines for research? I don’t either, but in any event, Google’s latest initiative looks to bring all of that content online and make it searchable. The company is adding digital archives to Google News, allowing you to see full scans of original newspapers from the pre-Web era in addition to being able to search the text of them.

To use the new service, you can either go to the Google News Archive, or search Google News and switch to the “timeline” view. When a story is viewable in its original format, the search result will list “Google News Archive” next to the name of the source.

It’s not clear how much content has been indexed so far, but searches for huge events like “Kennedy Assassination” and “Pearl Harbor” don’t seem to yield any digital archives yet, so I’d assume the index is still fairly small. As an example of a search that does show some results, Google suggests “Americans walk on the moon” which brings up original articles from a number of newspapers on July 21st, 1969.

Google already makes historical content from The New York Times and The Washington Post available in search results, though the publishers generally charge you money to access it. For its new effort, Google has partnered with the likes of ProQuest and Heritage, two of the companies responsible for all of that microfilm you find at the library.

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